New Truman Parkway section to open

Residents are worried about the Whitfield Road widening project.

PHarvey lives in a tidy wood-sided house with a front porch under tall shade trees on the quaintly named street, Quail Run.

"It's disgusting," Harvey said. "They just destroyed it."

He doesn't mean the house, but the area surrounding it. See, when he first moved there, he could sit on his porch and look at his neighbors' homes across the street.

Now he sees only weeds and scrub brush covering vacant lots and a vehicle-laden Whitfield Avenue. Beyond that towers the overgrown ramp that will hold the Truman Parkway, which is why the houses were removed.

"There is a lot of traffic, a lot of noise," he said.

Starting Sept. 22, there is likely going to be more traffic and more noise as the fourth phase of the Truman Parkway opens and drops cars essentially in his front yard.

Such is the nature of huge public projects.

While Harvey's front yard changed for the worse, drivers living in the area and down the road in The Landings will have a swift, unobstructed pathway to downtown.

The Truman odyssey has inched its way more than eight miles from President Street to Whitfield Avenue over the last 15 years, dodging endangered bald eagles and lawsuits. Along the way, politicians gathered for occasional ribbon cuttings as new sections opened.

Sept. 22 will be the last ribbon cutting for a while.

The next phase will take the Truman across a marsh and the Vernon River to Abercorn Extension near Lowe's and the Home Depot, but that could be more than five years down the road and $60 million in tax dollars later.

The county still has to acquire 40 to 60 more parcels of land, said Al Bungard, Chatham County's engineer. In all it will take $14 million just to buy the land.

Compare that to the Truman's phase four, which cost a mere $16 million in local, state and federal money. It extends from Montgomery Crossroad to Whitfield Avenue.

"I think it will relieve some traffic on Montgomery Crossroad and some traffic on Skidaway Avenue," Bungard said.

It will also take a good chunk of the 13,000 vehicles per day coming and going from The Landings off Whitfield, he said.

Concurrently, the county has been working on widening Whitfield to four lanes from Old Whitfield Avenue to Ferguson Avenue.

With property acquisition, the project will cost $11 million, according to the Transportation Improvement Program adopted by the Chatham Urban Transportation Study.

For some in the neighborhood, the widening concerns them more than the opening of the Truman.

Daisy Lavender, 73, is renting her house month-to-month from the county, which purchased it to build the road. She's looking for a house to rent for her and her family.

But with Truman coming, she sees development literally down the road.

"I really think it's going to be commercial going down the road to benefit the people in The Landings because they aren't going anywhere," she said.

A block away, William L. Jackson is frustrated the county hasn't offered to buy his home yet. He knows they want it and he's even bought a new house on Savannah's southside.

He could move out of the house he's lived in for 40 years, but he wants to wait until the county makes an offer so they will pay moving costs.

"It's really an emotional strain," he said. "Both my wife and I are in our 70s. No one will buy this house."

Other houses around him have been purchased already, he said.

Bungard said construction won't start until 2007 and will last another two years.

Federal and state rules for acquiring property were tightened in the last few years, he said. The changes have made it harder for local governments to buy houses before exact acquisition and design plans are developed.

Now homeowners must better demonstrate their hardships before the government will buy their houses before those plans are done.

Bungard said the acquisition plans should be done by the end of the year.

"From our point of view, it would be nice to settle with the county for a price so we can move and get a homestead exemption on our home next year," Jackson said. "I am going to try sending in some documentation."